Covid -19 and its continued impact.
How is the Covid -19 affecting your company?
We set up crisis management protocols right from the start, which enabled us to adapt our way of working in just a few days. Our information systems have proved to be particularly efficient, enabling the 100 people in the design office to work from home without loss of productivity.
Our supply chain was only affected for 2 weeks and I would like to thank our sub-contractors from the bottom of my heart for having chosen Mecatherm to avoid any supply shortage.
Nevertheless, COVID-19 was a major “stress test” that called upon all our staff individually, professionally and managerially. We were able to test the company’s very resilience on this occasion. I am very proud of the work and commitment of each and every one of our employees.
We entered the crisis with 3 objectives: to guarantee the safety of our staff; guarantee continuity of service to our customers; and guarantee Mecatherm’s financial solidity at the end of the crisis. We are pleased to see that these objectives have been achieved.
How is Covid-19 affecting service?
The imposed geographic travel limitation were offset by: a hotline offered to all our customers during the crisis; the availability of programmers to connect to all our installations, and the mobilization when necessary of local supply chains with our customers to produce parts in an emergency (either in machining, sheet metal work or 3D-printing).
This is the most flexible and responsive service model we had in place before the crisis and has proven perfectly effective.
How are you reassuring your clients during?
We have implemented exceptional protocols internally and pro-active communications with all our customers in operations, one-to-one and regularly, in order to be as close as possible to their needs and to remain in privacy of their industrial activity.
We have received from them a lot of recognition for this pro-active approach.
During the crisis, we had the pleasure of continuing to take significant industrial orders, and of course of being able to reassure our customers about our financial solidity, including providing of substantial bank guarantees.
Have you announced short term working?
One of our aims was to maintain all our teams. This objective has been reached and we are not considering any measures to reduce the workforce.
What are you short term plans after Covid-19?
We expect investment activity to generally slow down overall in the coming year.
We remain at our customer’s disposal for more minor maintenance operations or upgrades of their existing lines and equipment for purposes of flexibility or industrial performance.
Our business model is such that we can easily cope with very significant activity increases or decreases.
Olivier Sergent, President and CEO of the Mecatherm Group
